Monday, May 29, 2006

Success Formula Secrets Part Five

Welcome back everyone! My apologies for not updating this Blog for the past few days. I just came back from a vacation at the Sunny Resort Island of Batam in Indonesia. The weather there was great and I got a healthly dose of sunlight from it. Stayed at a Japanese Suite and it was absolute heaven! The decor was totally zen-like and it was so comfortable that my wife and I just didn't want to leave the suite :)

I also want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who dropped me an email telling me how much they've benefitted from my Blog. It's my pleasure sharing this knowledge for the benefit of everyone. My greatest happiness would be to see everyone benefitting from the knowledge I'm sharing just as I have benefitted as well.

Ok, back to the meaty stuff. Last installment was about the importance of having a plan. So what comes before a plan?

Having a good Strategy.

Before you even formulate your plan, you need to have a good strategy. In fact, you will probably need more than one strategy. Someone once asked me,

"Terence, what's a good strategy?"

My answer?

"A good strategy is one that produces the best results."

Sounds simple right?

So how do you know which strategy will produce the best results? When you get the results of course!

Remember how I stressed on the importance of measuring your results? You need to have Key Performance Indicators in order to track your results and know whether or not your strategies are effective.

Those in the corporate world and business circles will no doubt be familiar with the concept of Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. For those who are unfamiliar, KPIs can be simply explained as benchmarks to let you know how far you're progressing towards your goals and whether or not you are getting the desired results.

Sample KPIs are:

  • Sales volume for the month
  • Sales generated per sales personnel
  • Number of leads generated per month
  • Number of new customers per month
  • Number of repeat sales per month

There are much much more KPIs but the above are just a sampling of some KPIs that you could incorporate into your business or work.

So the key is to have as many strategies as possible. Sometimes, you never know which strategy will yield the best results.

There are times when the supposed 'best' strategy bottoms out and there are other times when strategies which were thought to be 'near useless' proved to be a dark horse and produced phenomenal results!

That's why you should think of as many strategies as possible and ALWAYS test the results of employing these stratgies.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and awoke the mighty sleeping giant that was the USA, how many strategies did you think they had? One? Two? Three? I believe they had many.

You need to have multiple strategies as well.

So here's what I'd like you to do:

  • Sit down, relax, and have a good thinker on the kind of results you want in your life
  • Devise strategies which you believe will get you to these results. Even if the strategy seems silly at face value, jot it down! Many phenomenal business successes were born out of strategies that seemed silly at face value!
  • Look at your stratgies at ask yourself these questions:
  1. How am I going to employ these strategies?
  2. How do I need to leverage on in order to execute these strategies?
  3. What are the events I can leverage on or create in order to employ these strategies?
  4. By when am I going to execute these strategies? Put a timeline to the strategies.


As always, nothing happens until you take action. Make use of what I've shared and prosper!

Carpe Diem ... Seize the day!